 I wouldn't follow any links to articles encouraging you to join an exclusive group. I mean, they're obviously clickbait. So in a turn of events, surprising for everyone except the entire world besides the US, the presidential election here has gone a little bit cockeyed. Candidates who aren't typical Democrats or Republicans have had surprisingly successful campaigns, which might lead one to wonder, why is being a typical Democrat or Republican such a big deal anyway? I mean, there's a significant number of pro-gun gay rights activists and environmentalist Christians who would probably love to have some option besides the classic blue team and red team, and yet no third party has ever won a US presidential election. Contrary to what many people think, that's not because of preferential media coverage or because of a conspiracy among politicians to suppress third parties, and it's not because most voters are stupid. In fact, quite the opposite. Among all the myriad things broken about the US election system, the specific method that we use to choose our president is particularly vulnerable to a game-theoric phenomenon in political science called du Verge's Law. Let's assume that we have a more or less normal distribution of voters, with a few radicals at the far left or right who want things like communism or theocracy, but a majority of people round about the middle of the road who have a few opinions left or right of the mean that more or less cancel out, leaving them indisposed toward either end of the spectrum. Now you could divide this distribution up in as many ways as there are voters, but because the United States uses something called the first pass the post or plurality voting system, if your candidate doesn't get more votes than any other, you're pretty much just out of luck. This is where game theory enters the picture. Everyone voting in the election wants the maximum number of policies important to them enacted, and which policies get enacted ultimately depends on how other people vote. So given a choice between any two candidates, one who represents them better but has a lower chance of being elected, and one who's not quite right but has a better shot, in the U.S. voting system it's always better to choose the more electable one. You can repeat that process iteratively for every single pair of candidates running, and eventually the normal distribution will ultimately break down into two main lumps. One slightly right of center candidate and one slightly left of center candidate. Two candidates, two parties, every time. The two which remain usually compete to see how close they can lean into the center of the curve without alienating the tails. If you no longer represent their policies at all, there's no incentive for the far left or right to vote for you anymore, and a third party candidate will swoop in and collect those votes. Now this is probably old news to many people living in the U.S., but the real problem here is that with Duverger's law driving political polarization, with only two colors on the map come election season, it becomes very easy to start thinking of this wonderfully diverse electorate as being composed of only two teams, and our brains are wired to do really weird things in teams. You might recall Thunk Episode 64 where I described the argumentative theory of human reason. Some evolutionary psychologists believe that our ability to think rationally didn't evolve to help us solve problems, but instead to convince other people that we're right, to dig our heels in on some position and argue others into agreement. Now there's no real way to know if that's what actually happened without a time machine, but it does explain a whole bunch of weird cognitive biases that our brains are prone to, reliable errors in reasoning that all humans make when trying to think rationally. If we had evolved rational thought to get the right answer all the time, all of these biases would be odd exceptions and errors, but in the context of argument, they actually kind of make sense. There's a set of these biases that seems to be dedicated to gathering other brains to a single position to strengthen and support it like a magnet, and it's terrifying. In-group bias and its partner out-group bias are names for clusters of issues that we have processing information correctly in certain contexts, namely when we start thinking of people around us as an in-group, that is people who we see as being on our team, and an out-group, people who we see as being on a competing one. At first, this seems like it might just be common sense. After all, if you feel close to someone, if you agree with their values and reasoning most of the time, then you're more likely to take their ideas seriously, right? But research shows that it doesn't matter at all how these teams are formed, whether you actually have anything in common with other members of your team, only that the teams are there and we are on one of them and yay us and screw those guys. In a study by already Taj fell at all, two groups of test subjects were sorted according to an absolutely meaningless criteria, whether they had overestimated or underestimated the number of dots on the screen. They were then given choices about how to distribute rewards and penalties to other test subjects for a similar estimation task. Despite the fact that the groups were obviously irrelevant, people would reliably assert that members of their own team were doing better and deserve rewards and that members of the other team were doing worse and deserve punishment. This result that even totally arbitrary groups still make our brains do weird stuff and still produce the effects of in-group bias is so robust and well established that there's actually a name for using meaningless groups in psychology research, the minimal group paradigm. The sort of effects that remain even under these conditions are really disturbing. Like dividing people into arbitrary groups makes them significantly more likely to assign positive traits to members of their group and negative traits to members of the out group, even if they've never met them. We're likely to show preference for those in-group members who promote the distinctiveness of the in-group rather than people who try to be more egalitarian. If a member of our in-group waves that yea us, we're so different flag, we're likely to view them more positively than those who don't. We tend to view out-group members as being more homogeneous or uniform in character, while in-group members are seen as more complex entities. We are apparently varied and diverse, while they are kind of all the same. We even have a greater empathic response for the suffering of in-group members. The parts of our brain responsible for feeling the pain of others light up when one of the in-group is suffering, and even for a lesser extent for strangers. But if one of them is in pain, nothing happens. And these phenomena are just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds upon hundreds of studies researching the implications of in-group bias on human behavior, each one documenting a way that we might reliably reach the wrong conclusion if we start thinking about things in terms of teams. Perhaps most worryingly, many of them point to a sort of positive feedback loop, where imagined distinctions between otherwise arbitrary groups become stronger and stronger, polarizing them further over time. Many of these studies document variables which exacerbate that effect and promote in-group bias, and some which mitigate it, things like context and framing. Bearing that in mind, I'd like to read to you a few choice phrases from the survey I received from the Democratic National Committee. Please complete the survey and return it to the DNC, the organization that leads our party to win elections and enact public policies shaped by our shared democratic values. Your ideas will help drive the DNC's efforts to stop Republicans from destroying our progress. How should the DNC react when Republicans and their special interest backers target Democrats with lies and personal attacks? Please choose one. The whole thing is rife with this sort of language and very deliberately so. When you're one of the two main teams, dousing people with in-group bias reinforces their allegiance to the in-group and their abhorrence for the out-group, both of which feed this process even further. Like I said, it's scary. With this sort of weaponized in-group bias engineered to affect our reasoning, I think that it behooves us to at least have some idea of how we might combat it, how we might check our work to see how much of our enthusiasm for certain debates is the result of our own values and how much of it is just our brain waving its little red team or blue team flag as hard as it can. First, anxiety or frustration over perceived competition for limited resources really drives this sort of polarization. If you ever find yourself thinking that it would be better for something to go to waste than to a member of your out-group, maybe ask yourself if someone's trying to make you feel worried or upset that your in-group won't get their fair share. If so, do they stand to gain from that mentality? Second, searching for several different ways to categorize people helps to lessen the severity of the in-group identity that we build up in our heads. The world isn't just liberals and conservatives. It's also Potterheads, Christians, science nerds, Trekkies. After all, politics is just one way among many that people can be similar or different. And bearing that in mind can make whatever differences you're currently focused on seem a little bit less important. And finally, just taking a couple seconds to identify how you and the person you're arguing with are actually on the same team can be remarkably helpful for reducing both in-group and out-group bias. No matter how alien you find their ideology, there is some scenario in which you and the person you're talking to would work together towards a common goal. And bearing that in mind can help unstick your brain from its trench. Where have you felt the effects of in-group or out-group bias? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share. And don't stop thunking.